


Expertise Other Than in War

by scioscribe



Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Chastity Device, F/F, Incest, Mythology References, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Worldbuilding, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2019-02-18 19:04:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13106571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Antiope is not made for peace.





	Expertise Other Than in War

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Wavesinger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Wavesinger/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, writer of excellent Amazon-related prompts.

Antiope remembers being whole.

She awoke down in the sea and was driven up into the light, through lightening palettes of blue, until the crown of her head came up through the surf.  Sunlight broke upon her skin and dried the water; left her encrusted with salt.  Then Zeus, examining what he had brought forth, shook his mighty head, like a lion setting his mane to wave.   _No, no.  This won’t do.  You’ll be divided against yourself.  You cannot lead man to peace through war if you don’t know what it is you want.  You must be simpler.  Purer.  One to push forward, the other to hold back.  It is cleaner that way._

And he took his thumbnail and ran it down her forehead, her nose, all the way down her body, scratching her as easily, as deeply, as if she were wet clay.

Her body and soul came apart.  There she was, looking at herself in the strong, warm summer light: the water beaded along her eyelashes, the shadows her breasts cast on her belly, the digging-in of her toes into the sand.  From one woman to two.  She could still feel the ridged edge of a seashell under Hippolyta’s heel.  Sometimes, late at night, her foot cramps and she thinks she feels it still.

They call each other _sister_.  It is cleaner that way.

*

War makes the two of them make sense.  Antiope is the sword, Hippolyta is the shield.  Battles cannot be won without both.

Antiope is not Ares: she feels the tragedy of lives that are lost for petty gains.  A hand’s-breadth of territory here, an avenged slight there.  Gray-eyed Athena may love Odysseus, but other than that, wisdom seldom meets warfare, and much of what happens on the field is selfish, brutal, and preventable.  Antiope knows all this.  But there is a physical beauty to the way a soldier’s thigh tenses with well-trained muscle as she springs into the air.  The arc of a woman’s body bending down backwards from her horse to retrieve a fallen sword from the bloodied sand has the same poetry as the flight of an eagle passing overhead.  Both body and eagle, she thinks, are sacred to Zeus, dedicated to him, and this is their function in motion.

There is no one she loves more than she loves her sisters-in-arms when they are in the midst of chaos; nothing she loves more than kneeling and kissing Hippolyta’s hand after some victory and seeing an uneven splotch of blood on her sister’s skin, the blurry shape of her own lips.  Her own blood or someone else’s, she never knows, and she thinks it’s right not to know.  Whatever mortals think, war is not about clarity.  Antiope, split from Hippolyta, has had enough of _one or the other_.  She wants _both_.  She wants everything.  And that, she knows, is war.

Then Zeus says: go be peaceful, like a scroll waiting to be unwound.  Go be fruit that is not eaten if no one is hungry.  Hide on this island, from Ares and from men, until Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, mother of the god-killer, says that the time to strike has come.

Hippolyta, her hand on her belly, fervently says, “And may it _never_ come.  What good are they to us?  We gave them everything and they stood by as Ares put his foot against our necks and beat us down.”  She spits off the side of the boat.  “They are too corrupted by now to be brought to peace.  Let them destroy themselves.”

Antiope has no love for the world of men.  They are the cause of war, and what soldier loves her cause?  But she feels her usefulness severed from her, a branch lopped off a tree.  The boat rocks beneath her feet.  She takes her sister’s hand.  Once, the whorls of their palms and fingers matched, but not for a century now.  They have become distinct from each other.  No matter how tightly she holds on, she can’t get to a moment when the boundaries between their bodies blur.

At least Hippolyta doesn’t say, “You’re hurting me.”

At least she holds on just as tightly.

*

Themyscira is a jewel.  The figs grow plumper than any Antiope has ever seen, the hives teem with bees making sweet honey, quail lay eggs at unheard-of rates, and even new grapes make aged wine.  The water is sometimes so clear that the fisherwomen can see swordfish and squid through the shifting surface; their spears and nets don’t know how to miss.  Paradise abates as the years creep on, even well before Zeus’s power in the world thins, and Antiope understands why.  At first, you let a child with a wooden sword have her victories; only as she learns do you begin, step-by-step, to discourage her.  Each lesson is one more concession you have taken back.  So farming is easy and then less easy and then hard and then harder, but by the time the soil loves them no more than it loves anyone else in Greece, their farmers are hard-muscled bores who speak of nothing but irrigation systems and the ripeness of their olives; their competence has become perfect.

Antiope takes a beekeeper to bed in part for the sheer novelty of her plumpness.  She is _soft_ , in body as well as skin; she is physical proof of peace.  And she knows so many things, while Antiope knows only one.  If she is peace, peace is a good and beautiful thing: a drizzle of honey on round bare thighs, coppery-brown skin with no more wear than calluses on the fingertips, discussions of Aristotle undertaken between bites of pomegranate and beechnuts eaten one by one.  The beekeeper’s name is Dareia.

If the gods were truly as good as they tell Diana, Antiope thinks, Dareia would have lingered a little longer in her arms; though maybe the truth is that if the gods were truly good, Antiope would have done more to deserve her.

She does not try again for peace: it’s too much of a relief to have failed at it.

*

Menalippe’s expectations of her are fewer.  She is enough of a soldier to have Antiope’s own impatience with luxury and enough of a philosopher--their library is filled with her words, written on the finest linen--to devise ways of drinking long draughts of their past, ways of placing a drop or two of muddled warfare within wine until, thus infused, the taste has completely changed.

She withholds Antiope’s release.  Peace is a friend to perversion, Antiope has—not ungratefully—learned, and Themyscira holds many inventions and delights that could never have been devised without leisure.  Menalippe’s favored belts, of iron and leather, are foremost among them.  A stiff leather shield covers where Antiope most craves touch; an undignified, shamefully utilitarian metal hoop bars her from any penetration.

Antiope serves her, bringing her to climax after climax, while Menalippe tangles her hands in Antiope’s hair and pulls it until her scalp aches.

“What a faithful general you are,” Menalippe says, her legs still open.  Her breath is uneven.

Antiope is down on her knees on the floor.  “I am yours.”

“Then kiss me,” Menalippe says, extending her hand.  Antiope brushes her lips against it and then lays her forehead down on it, smooth skin against smooth skin.

“This should be the other way around,” she says.  Almost joking, but not quite.  “It will be terrible for morale to have a general getting such high-handed treatment from one of her soldiers.”

Neither one of them says anything about the hierarchy dissolving between them, either because of peace or because of love.  They believe in the words they say, the oaths they swear, too much for that.

Instead, Menalippe, her voice different now, says, “I am enough your woman, General, to kneel to you with all happiness and with no questions--if that were what you really wanted.”  She shrugs.  “It’s not.”

She can see trouble coming, the way a sentinel spots the smoke of distant fires.  She rolls over and takes Menalippe’s breast roughly in her hand: the immediate rise of her nipple against Antiope’s palm implies some truth to what she’s saying, that she would like whatever she received at Antiope’s hands.  Her own cunt aches beneath the shield Menalippe has put on her.  Distantly, it’s how she felt with Dareia.  This, too, she could relish.  Antiope has always been flexible: a true commander knows the pleasure of both ends of the chain of command, since she is forever in the middle of it.  So why, then, does she let go?

Why can she not stop thinking of her lips against Menalippe’s hand?

She says, “And what is it that you think I want, exactly?”

In answer, Menalippe reaches to Antiope’s brow and runs her thumb in a straight line down her face.  The feel of Zeus’s hand splitting Hippolyta from her.  Gods, but this woman is like her.  She won’t say _Hippolyta_ when she could say _yourself_ , she won’t say _your queen_ when she could say _your sister_ , she won’t say anything at all, in seriousness, if she can’t say everything.

Unable to say that she’s wrong, Antiope says, “Take me,” and opens her legs; moves the lock at her hip with her fingers, back and forth and back and forth.  “Or let me take myself.”

“No,” Menalippe says, with false heartlessness.  Her eyes are unreadable.  “I can’t have you spending your energy on these pursuits when you might need them for the frenzy of battle.  But if you continue as well as you’ve begun, I’ll unfasten your bindings long enough to give you a caress or two.  No more, not for right now.”

In this way, for a time, she is satisfied.  There is something about Menalippe saying, _I won’t give you what you want_ , that makes Antiope feel like she _is_ getting what she wants: that she is getting, at least, the admission that something is being denied to her.

*

During Hippolyta’s long pregnancy and pained delivery, Antiope resents this unnamed child who has split them still further apart, who has changed the shape of her sister’s body and caused her exhaustion and pain.  It is not a resentment that can survive more than a moment of holding the newborn Diana in her arms.   _So_ , she thinks, tracing the small, perfect nose, _this is what it’s like to be born an innocent._

It isn’t the prophecies or the powers that most draw Antiope’s attention to her niece, but the simple ordinary miracle of her: that this child, made from two, is so completely one, is so completely Diana.

She doesn’t even look like Hippolyta.  She certainly doesn’t look like Zeus, which means the story Hippolyta tells her of her birth sometimes seems, to Antiope, truer than the truth.

She doesn’t fight like Hippolyta, either.  She is better.

Antiope saves that fact for the worst argument she ever has with her sister: it’s the night Diana has been cut across the belly with a dagger she moved away from too slowly.  The healer clucks over her--Diana is the pet of the island--and rubs salve into her skin.  (The medicine is partly made from beeswax, partly from Dareia’s hive.  Antiope has fucked half the women on Themyscira and is reminded of it constantly.  She doesn’t regret the motions of it--she has never regretted any real movement--but she regrets the endings, which have so seldom been peaceful.)  Diana, woozy from blood loss and fuzzy-headed from the herbs she’s been given to dull the pain, laughs and hums.

Hippolyta finds it less amusing.

“You have been careless,” she says, the last word almost entirely a hiss.

“I would be careless to allow her such coddling as would mean she never took a blow from a friend before she risked taking one from an enemy.”

Hippolyta scoffs.  “That seems to be your true expertise lately, isn’t it?”

Antiope goes still.  She has been working this whole incident tactically, even strategically, allowing herself to plan long-range, but now she moves to the defensive.  She says, foolishly, “What does that matter to you?”

“It matters if I can’t trust my general—my _sister_ —to be clearheaded, to have her priorities—”

“You have never cared about my priorities,” Antiope says.  “You have never cared about the clearness of my head.”

Hippolyta flings her hands up in the air.  It is a gesture Antiope herself used to make, though not for many centuries now.  It is from a time before she grew accustomed to frustration.  “You will make this about yourself.  You have never cared for Diana as you should.”

“If you were anyone else, sister,” Antiope says, “I would kill you for saying that.  I love her like my own daughter—and even if I did not, I would love her as one of my soldiers.  As my _best_ soldier.  When it comes to our true purpose, Hippolyta, our princess far outshines her queen.”

“You forget our purpose,” Hippolyta says.  Her voice is always lowest when she is at her most furious.  “We are meant to inspire.”

“Yes.  We were made with these muscles, with these skills, for _inspiration_.  I was born loving bloodshed for _inspiration_.”

“You were not born at all,” Hippolyta says.  “You were _cast off_ from me.”

They have never, in over a thousand years, spoken of this.  Yet Antiope feels how ancient the argument it is, as if it’s been behind all their conversations before now.  She cannot do without Hippolyta, but in this moment, she wants to.  Hippolyta is the release she craves but will never be granted.

“Perhaps,” she says, “I was the one who was intended.”

"If that were true,” Hippolyta says, “you would be Diana’s mother and I would not.”  Just because she loves peace does not mean that she loves mercy.

 _As if him wanting you proves anything_ , Antiope wants to sneer, but she cannot.  Because what does she want from Hippolyta, if not completion, if not to once again be true, and how does she want it, if not the way Zeus did?  That is her deepest shame.  That Menalippe knows it, and does not hate her for it, has been some comfort to her; that Hippolyta does not know it, that she does not feel the same, has never hurt her more.  She could resist very well if she knew Hippolyta resisted at all herself, but now she can see that she does not.  They are fighting two different wars on the same battlefield.  Hippolyta thinks that all of this is about a god.

Peace looks up; war looks out.  That is one of the differences between them, one of the ones that developed over time: Antiope’s range of vision is just a little shorter than her sister’s.  Hippolyta was made to look upon Olympus.

She leaves and Hippolyta’s voice echoes after her.  They do not speak for three years.  If it is hard to be the general of an army without talking to her queen, it is not impossible, not in these damnable times of peace.

*

Antiope plans her future in small, careful brush-strokes.

One day, she says, she will go with Menalippe to Dareia’s apiary, and Dareia will show them both how to gather honey: the beestings will feel like wounds and the sweetness will make their efforts worth the pain.  And at the end of it all, she will know something.

One day, she will see Diana surpass her.  She has surpassed everyone else already; Antiope is the only one left who can stand against her for any length of time.  And it may be that this is only because Diana turns constantly to her mother, to see if Hippolyta is watching her, and Antiope has learned not to look.

One day, she thinks, when all of this is over, when the earth is dust and man and Amazon alike are done, she will step into the surf with her sister at her side.  The longing inside her will end.  There will be no difference between her lips and Hippolyta’s, no difference between their hands, and then at last she will be who she was, and she will be able to do as she ought to do.  She could go to Menalippe and bring Menalippe to her knees.  She could say, truthfully, _I want no one but you._

The depth of her incompletion frightens her.  She wants better things for Diana; she wants Diana to know the truth she’s being kept from.

But she does not tell her.  She commits treason only in action, never in word.

So when she and her sister are watching Diana train one day, when Diana is moving with incredible, graceful effectiveness, cutting all her own sisters down without pause, she shakes her head.  All the panting, all the sweating.  She knows Diana could do this more easily if she _knew_ she could do this more easily.

“I know what you are thinking,” Hippolyta says.  The sun is strong that day, it glitters in her hair.

She surely does, but this is so seldom true that Antiope, despite all her love, despite the restraint Menalippe has taught her, cannot resist saying, “Do you really?”

But Hippolyta just stretches out her arms, long and limber.  “Yes,” she says.  “I do.”


End file.
